Wilted Rose
by ncfan
Summary: -Strauss x Stella, Adelheid- To live on, alone.


**Characters**: Adelheid, Strauss**  
Summary**: To live on, alone.**  
Pairings**: Strauss x Stella, onesided Strauss x Adelheid**  
Author's** **Note**: Oh, while I do think this fandom is woefully under stocked with fanfiction, I do delight in the fact that this means I can write what I want without it being overplayed and worn out.**  
Disclaimer**: I don't own _Record of a Fallen Vampire_.

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To watch him haunt the halls of the palace is to look upon the living dead, to watch a man who should not be walking, should instead be inhabiting a coffin for his eternal rest. His ruby eyes are dead and glint only like old, weathered glass.

He's searching for that high, trilling laugh, and Adelheid knows Strauss won't find it. She thinks that, maybe, Strauss knows too, and that's why his dull eyes take on that particularly intense gleam of despair when he roams the palace and searches the Hazelburke estate.

He won't find her. Not there, not anywhere.

Adelheid carries Stella in her, maybe not as much as Strauss does, but she carries bits of pieces of the human girl in her. They all do. Adelheid can see her in Bridget when the latter is searching for Strauss, blue eyes—a trait inherited firmly from Adelheid's sister's dhampire mother—riveted on the halls in front of her and otherwise smooth brow furrowed with worry lines. Bridget's smiles have long since died.

Bridget brushes past her legitimately-born half sister without seeing her, and the worry of her face is just like Stella's.

Stella exists most specifically in Strauss, but he is sadly unaware of his love's presence and wanders the world in a pain-numbed daze. Adelheid is almost glad Stella is no longer living to see her husband brought to this.

Stella was never the sort who would want anyone to suffer for her sake.

It was for that reason, Adelheid is sure, that Stella had begged her to say nothing of her death, had implored her not to reveal the nature of her connection to the Infinite Cross. There would have been nothing but pain born from that revelation; Adelheid could—can—see it.

She still scrubs in secret to get Stella's blood off her hands. The smell rises in her nostrils when she sleeps.

Maybe it would give Strauss some comfort, to know that Stella was still smiling when she died, that she wasn't alone. But Adelheid knows better, and there would be no more or less pain for Strauss if he had this information in his hands and heart.

And his pain is intense enough already, left undisturbed to fester and leave an oozing abscess on his heart. Anything Adelheid says or does might only exacerbate his pain.

Admittedly, Adelheid is jealous. When they lie in bed together, there is always someone lying between them, and Strauss pays the phantom far more attention than he does his wife. Strauss is so wrapped up in the thoughts of the child he could have had that he pays no attention to the children he should be having in the here and now; the reason, Adelheid suspects, that she has not conceived has little to do with the fact that two vampires have a hard time bearing children and everything to do with the fact that she and Strauss have known each other as husband and wife no more than five times throughout the course of their marriage.

Adelheid's envy smolders and would burn much more brightly if it were not for her sadness. She is not accustomed to jealousy and petty rages, doesn't have the nature for it, and Stella's bright star going out saddens Adelheid as much as it does others who knew her.

There can be no satisfaction in the elimination of her rival when the one she loves still loves Stella so much, still feels so much pain. Adelheid would heal him, if she just knew how and if Strauss would just let her in. He won't, of course he won't. He's never let anyone but Stella in, won't even extend that courtesy to his wife.

And somehow, for an instant, Strauss's abject, black despair becomes Adelheid's own. She has known Strauss since she was a small child, always admired and adored him, and just when she thought she could have him—the selfishness of this line of thought galls her—he has become a stranger. She doesn't know who she's seeing when she looks into Strauss's pale, drawn, gaunt face.

Strauss carries Stella with him more heavily than any other ever will. His shoulders are bowed under her phantom weight, and he is so blinded in his grief that he can't even put a weight to what yokes his shoulders.

His grief blinds him, cripples him, slowly kills him.

Strauss is in the winter of his life. Without Stella, he is nothing to himself, and others are nothing to him. There is no vitality left over for him anymore, nothing at all; he's wilting away like the snow-white lilies and blood red roses Adelheid collects for her vases once they've been cut for long enough. Even with water, they don't survive, and Adelheid can't tell herself that this is due, in large part, to the fact that they can never be given sunlight.

He wilts, he decays, he dies.

All the while, searching for Stella, always one step behind her, never finding her.

The desperate, despairing chase that will never be concluded.

Adelheid sees it.

She can see the echoes of Stella that haunt the halls, nowhere and everywhere, always with her, always with Strauss, but she knows Strauss never will.


End file.
